We know the digital asset lifecycle

Digital asset management can help you create assets during any of the following four stages: definition, idea generation, planning and development. Read More…

A digital asset is often part of a greater call to action, such as a new product, special promotion or social media campaign. You might need assets like a logo, photos, graphics, or a short video.

Once you’ve selected the type of digital assets you’ll need, it’s time to get into the details of design which includes generating ideas, brainstorming, and making decisions about how you want the asset to look and feel to users. During the creation phase, you spend time developing a concept along brand guidelines and an idea takes shape. Timelines are also established, and the logistics are planned out. All of this can be shared, and commented on, in a good DAM system.

Once this framework is in place, creation happens! Graphic designers get to work and the videographer begins the filming process. Quality digital assets take the time and effort of multiple people. Input and approvals are required at many junctures. That’s where a DAM system, like the Widen Media Collective, can really kick in and begin to streamline your process.

Give creativity a boost with digital asset management

A good DAM system can foster creativity and idea generation by allowing users to quickly access assets used in the past.

Viewing old campaigns and digital assets gives a comprehensive view of what has been done before. If your DAM system provides analytics data, you can easily track successful content and gain insights for future creation. The Media Collective tracks analytics data at the asset level, and site level, which can provide you with all the details needed to decide a best future course of action.

Now that you’ve created a bunch of digital assets, it’s time to focus on the basics of managing them. Read More…

With the excitement of creation behind you, it’s time for the nuts and bolts of managing your digital assets. Approvals, logistics, versioning — as well as roles and permissions — are a few of the topics you’re likely to encounter.

Using a DAM system at this stage organizes content, makes it easily searchable and provides access to users at different levels so each user sees only what you want them to see.

A digital asset management system can increase efficiency in the following areas of your asset management:

Streamlining of the approval process. A manager can follow a link to approve or comment on digital assets. Once approved, the asset remains in the same location.

Simplification of logistics, so you can find what you need. Tagging or using collections allows efficient access to digital assets even without file naming conventions or metadata.

Versioning made easy. Keep all iterations of an asset, with notes and comments, in the same place. Digital assets can be linked to websites and blog posts, and will automatically update when a new version is approved.

A DAM system provides access levels to different types of users based on their needs – for example viewing rights, upload abilities, or approval.

A good system allows roles and permissions to be assigned to users so that they see only what you want them to see. That means a project manager has access to approve the files for their campaign, a designer can upload new versions, and a marketing specialist can download the digital assets they need for the task at hand.

Providing the right kind of access

Deciding who gets access to what content is a big part of managing digital assets. Widen offers products that meet the simplest and most complicated access needs.

For companies with many affiliates and a large marketing department, the Media Collective provides a scalable structure for efficient use. For simple, easily downloadable asset groups, the stylized collection feature allows you to create clearly-branded asset collections for viewing or download.

If you have lighter digital asset management needs, our Smartimage software may be a better solution for you.

Since you’d like team members, and sometimes end users, to utilize the digital assets you’ve worked so hard to create, it’s critical that they’re easily accessible to the “right” people when they’re needed. Read More…

Much like DAM management, efficient distribution of digital assets relies heavily on roles and permissions. Distribution hinges on providing users easy access to the digital assets they need. In a DAM system, users have access to the appropriate images, illustrations, videos and documents in various file formats, resolutions and dimensions. A collection might include the necessary files for a complete campaign (such as high-resolution, poster-ready photos), images optimized for social media, and easy-use website headers.

Much like management, efficient distribution relies on roles and permissions. In a DAM system, users have access to appropriate images, illustrations, videos, and documents. Beyond providing the right level of access, DAM systems can deliver assets in various file formats, resolutions, and dimensions. A collection might include the necessary files for a complete campaign, such as high-resolution poster-ready photos, social media optimized images, and easy-use website headers.

A savvy DAM system goes beyond the basics of simple downloading. It also provides links and embed codes that enable digital assets to be published directly to websites, blog posts and social media.

Saving time, money and sanity

Many companies have experienced a slow creep in file distribution, only to discover at some point they have one or more people who spend almost all of their time emailing files to partners.

The Yankee Candle Company found themselves caught in a cycle where it took 8-15 days for a distributor to get the digital assets they needed in the right format and file size. According to Lisa Gauvin, Yankee Candle’s Associate Marketing Manager, after implementation of the Widen Media Collective, the company vastly improved asset delivery time with self-serve access that freed up staff to work on new projects.

Digital assets have a lifetime, so when they’re no longer in use you should archive and preserve them. Read More…

How long an asset remains in distribution depends on the asset itself. One video may only be relevant during a short marketing campaign, while another describing a key aspect of your company can have a much longer lifetime. Preservation, or archiving, digital assets and their related documents and versions, is a key part of the lifecycle.

Keeping files organized and easily available saves time and money. A digital asset management system can provide a cost-efficient, archive-level environment, where using management tools like tagging helps users access related files in seconds.

Some DAM solutions, like the Media Collective, take it a step further by offering low-cost archive storage. Cloud-based DAM storage offers a preservation system that’s great for raw video, discarded photos from a shoot, and other types of data. These are the kinds of files you don’t need at your fingertips, so it’s OK if it takes a little longer to download from the archive.

Tracking asset performance

Gone are the days when you created an illustration or video and sent it out for use, relying on sporadic feedback about the success of the asset. With optimization analytics, digital asset management systems like the Media Collective can provide data about:

Which digital assets are performing best

Which assets are underutilized

Which types of assets are more in demand by users

Which types of digital assets are not needed by users

Who your power users are

What your users are (and are not) searching for

Where digital assets are being embedded

Analytic information provides much-needed marketing data about how and where assets are being used, and can help inform future asset creation.

Hundreds of thousands of users around the world trust the DAM solutions from Widen

“Widen’s support team is phenomenal. They consistently have fast and thorough responses for anything I ask about. Widen is very intuitive even for an admin like myself who took on auditing & overhauling our asset organization structure. We have been working with Widen for over 7 years, and I highly recommend them.”

Valerie DeCleene, Brady Corporation

“The whole idea is that you don’t design content for a page anymore. With Widen’s DAM system, we’re able to have a super high res image and it’s the same image we use for any page layout, any app, or any showroom tool. The technology is there to manipulate that one image on the fly and update it automatically anywhere it lives. I’m so glad we’re done with the old way of designing for each page and duplicating content management effort.”

John Kuehl, Sub-Zero and Wolf

“We have 19 global offices and over 600 staff that I need to potentially share photos with. Using the DAM system makes it seem like we’re much closer to our colleagues around the world and the program on the ground level. When sponsors or employees find out they can send a link and see what they need to see, it makes everyone’s job eight million times easier.”

Nikki Lebenson, Institute of International Education

Widen’s digital asset management software has helped these companies, and many more, grow…

“The Summit content was great, but its true benefit is its cultivation of community, which is clearly a priority for Widen. It was great to meet people with similar challenges, DAM-related and otherwise, even though we work in organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Read the love!

“Prior to attending the User Summit, there was a significant gap between what we were doing and what we had the potential to do. Now, I feel more confident than ever that we are prepared to build and sustain an efficient DAM system that will benefit every level of our organization.”

What makes Widen the best digital asset management solutions provider?

From software to service, there’s a lot that goes into the making of a comprehensive digital asset management system. Let’s take a look at the top 12 reasons that Widen’s DAM software is a leading choice for every marketing organization’s content command center.

We’re 85 people strong and we know digital media. Our team is comprised of experts in the digital asset management arena — from creation to distribution. Plus, we provide a total service experience that includes upfront advisory and consulting services, guided implementation, project management, training support, launch support, ongoing help desk and customer support, regular software updates, as well as managed security and infrastructure. Learn more about our service & support and checking out this customer experience infographic.

We’re small enough to remain agile and provide total concentration on digital asset management. Widen excels at delivering the best pure-play SaaS DAM solutions. It’s all we do, and we’ve been doing it for a long time. We’re experienced, focused and constantly working to advance overall customer satisfaction. We started over a decade ago by developing our own solution from the ground-up, and to this day DAM is what we do. That’s extremely rare in this industry.

Our 67 year history shows we’ve been there, done that and have a wealth of experience. With that, we’ve become adept at providing innovative, world-class solutions and services to marketing groups, creative teams and other organizations that need a strong digital asset management system. Although we’ve “seen it all,” we’re still hungry to learn and innovate. That’s why we consistently make a point of staying ahead of the times with the staffing, education, training and membership organizations we belong to. Widen is a self-funded, stable company and we’d be happy to provide documentation of these facts upon your request. We’re planning for the next 60 years, and looking for ways to improve our service offering on a daily basis.

We have great customers. From Fortune 500 enterprises, to higher ed, healthcare, manufacturing, destination marketing, hospitality, food service, government, energy, agencies, non-profits and more, our diverse customer base informs the future direction of our digital asset management system. Regardless of the industry, marketing and creative people all share many of the same problems. They all need better DAM solutions. We work with a broad range of organizations and that’s part of where we attain our depth. Ask us for a list of customers like you.

We’re a complete end-to-end marketing technology company. From the creative start, to the digital asset lifecycle, to management, distribution, and long term preservation downstream, Widen understands and caters to digital assets in an organic, easy-to-use way. Although our service offerings have changed with the times, we continue to offer capture and creation services, image manipulation and retouching, catalog production and color management on the front-end of customers’ digital supply chains. We round it out with the best digital asset management software for management, distribution, and long-term preservation to marketing organizations. If you’re interested, please ask us for a digital audit.

100% cloud-based DAM. If you’re seeking the best digital asset management system for your marketing organization, chances are you’re best served by a cloud-based DAM solution. The cloud offers greater cost control, scalability, ease of maintenance — and security — to fast-moving, distributed marketing networks. For most organizations, IT teams and infrastructures can’t keep up with the digital media explosion in the way that Widen can with the cloud. Ask us about our sophisticated cloud infrastructures.

We’re secure on every front. We treat data security very seriously. With Widen, you can trust that your data is secure in a private cloud and our configurations are as sophisticated as they come. Widen regularly participates in various security audits and penetration tests, and we continually pass with flying colors. No matter what type of digital assets you’re working with, it’s our job to keep them safe, secure and easily accessible with our cloud-based digital asset management software. Ask us more about our security protocols and we’re happy to tell you more under NDA.

We provide the right fit features and functionality to marketing and creative workflows. We deliver all the core features you’d expect with a sophisticated, best-in-class digital asset management solution, along with several others you won’t get from everyone. Our DAM system feature set embraces key functionalities for searching and filtering, file management and versioning, media conversions and transcoding, roles and permissions, collaboration, web publishing, sharing, intelligence, tracking, reporting and more. Check out this quick list of Widen’s key features.

Pay for what you use pricing. Unlike many of the digital asset management solutions on the market, Widen does not charge you for features and functionality you do not need or will never use. Plus, our model — upfront licensing and implementation along with a monthly subscription — is priced based on the number of users and storage needs you have. Request a proposal to get more pricing details on our DAM solutions.

We’re integrated with some really stellar solutions. We’ve integrated with Amazon Web Services for all of our infrastructure needs; ProofHQ and Workfront for marketing work management; Dropbox and Box for popular file management and transfer integrations; Digimarc digital watermarking and more. These integrations add value to Widen’s digital asset management solutions. Plus, we play nice with others, and offer many other web services integrations — from web content management, to ecommerce, CRM, ERP, PIM and more. Ask us for more info about our API and other customer examples.

We know the ins and outs of digital asset management like no other company can. Our years of experience, and dedication to service and constant improvement have given us wisdom and insights that only come through time, and testing … and more testing. In fact, we’re the primary test subject for our DAM software. Our premedia production teams continue to use our own automated technologies and highly refined service offering to assist catalogers and multichannel marketers create, manipulate, manage, distribute, track and measure their digital media investments. We’re in complete control of the advancements to our product and we continue to advance based on internal operations, customer feedback and market intelligence to make the Widen Media Collective the best DAM solution for marketing organizations today.

We’re all about education. We can’t be the best digital asset management vendor partner unless we can make you and your key team members the best DAM champions and administrators. That’s why we provide volumes of resources across all phases of the DAM decision, implementation and continued growth processes. Get a taste for what we have to offer in our resource center, including white papers, webinars, videos, guides, blogs posts and more. You can also check out all the content and learnings from our most recent Widen User Summit. Feel free to contact Widen anytime for more info on our upcoming events and educational opportunities, or to discuss your digital asset management needs further.